03/09/2026
Nine days apart. Somebody up there is putting together a hell of a panel.
In January 1987, Ms. named Dolly Parton one of its Women of the Year, alongside a senator, a novelist and a former nun who sheltered Central American refugees.
The tribute was written by Gloria Steinem, and it opened by admitting that people who hadn't listened closely to either Dolly or feminism might be surprised to learn the two went together.
Then she made the case: Parton had used her business sense to bring other women and people from impoverished backgrounds up with her, and had turned every devalued symbol of womanhood — the hair, the rhinestones, the figure — into her own instrument.
Dollywood was a year old at the time.
Steinem was quick to identify it as a huge accomplishment — a dream of bringing jobs into the mountains that raised her.
Parton was never one for labels, and Steinem didn't need her to.
That was the point of the original 1987 piece, and arguably one of the larger points about Steinem: the movement she spent sixty years building was never a uniform.
It was a definition wide enough to hold a woman in a black turtleneck and a woman in a sequined jacket in the same photo, and to mean it.
Ms. re-ran the essay last week when Dolly died. Six days later, the woman who wrote it was gone too.
Read it now and it lands as a double eulogy: one woman recognizing another, both of them refusing to let anyone else decide what their power should look like.
They found their own.
They spent their lives helping the rest of us find ours.
